Saturday, 28 July 2012

So calm, so good. You'd leave your children with him if you went to the shops. If he stayed the night over you'd find him doing the washing up in the morning.

Whenever I hear Vincent Baker in a podcast or see him explain something in one of these videos I always get the impression that if you asked him if he wanted Brown sauce or Tomato he would purse his lips, look down and to the right for a second, nod, and say

"That.. that's a really interesting question. Thanks. Thanks for bringing that up. You've really shown me a new side to this. I'm going to think about that."

Then a week later he releases a hyper-focused pdf-only rpg where Genghis Khan has to choose between brown or red sauce and the decision changes the future of the whole world and you play the sauce but you are also in the future betting on the outcome. It would be called Sauceoscope. The Forge would love it. Knowing the rules would get you laid at Gencon.

I really really liked Apocalypse World, which he made, and I really really like LOTFP, which it's for, so if anyone out there feels the same and you have $20.00 to spare go and fund his Wizard Tower thing here-

I want to play in that goddammn wizards tower so bad!! Even I spent 20.00 on it and I am a fucking prole with a part time job.

ITS BASED ON JACK VANCE! YOU ALL LIKE JACK VANCE DON'T YOU NERDS? Come on, some of you have real jobs and lives and stuff. You can afford this.

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

There
is nothing wrong with flirting with teenage boys through an imaginary
male character in an imaginary bar if that is what the reaction
die says.

If
this makes you incredibly awkward you can just say "ok ok, he flirts
with you."

Fake
being gay to kill thieves.

If
an invulnerable monster comes out of a jar you just smashed open and tries to eat your leg, the
answer will be found by smashing open all of the identical jars.

'Guy-With-The-Falcata'
sounds cooler than 'Axe guy'

One
of my players actually knows what a Falcata is.

Psionic
snails make everything easier.

Players
are happier with random tattoos from a carousing roll than they are
with actual treasure.

A
player who will not surrender his platemail in an agonising cross
country walk, or when it gets bent out of shape in a pit-trap, or in
a massive argument with his actual real-life friends about the
consequences of encumbrance, will do so immediately "to get it
enameled with like a serpent-rope design to match my tattoo".

If
you get a neck tattoo, you can never go back to being an accountant.

Somone playing a thieving, mass-murdering, Goat-Skull-Worshiping former accountant will refuse to throw an arm wrestling match for money because he considers his character 'Chaotic Good.'

If
you murder someone, and they come back from the dead with the evil
use of a Jade Monkey amulet. And you kill them again.
You can just mess up their stuff and leave the body hoping the
authorities take it for a "jade monkey hate crime."

A
cleric called 'Hirgen the Fondler' should get a thicker skin, or not
go out drinking.

Thursday, 12 July 2012

I
did a bad thing in a game once and I thought about it for a long
time.

I
was a corporate fixer for Gazprom in an alternate version of
Liverpool run by the Militant. There was a girl working for an escort
agency and my bosses told me that there would be a significant payoff
if we delivered her. We were told she was involved in espionage.
Which we believed to be the case.

I
and some friends carefully planned the perfect abduction and carried
it out. It took two or three sessions, so six to nine hours of my
life were spent committing this imaginary crime.

In
all the schemes our Cyberpunk characters had tried, this is the only
one that went off perfectly. Its also the only one that was really
very very immoral in an immediate sense.

All
of the things we did were somewhat dodgy, we tried smuggling drugs,
we got into gunfights with priests and went gambling. At one point my
character had a security guy tied up in a basement and executed him
in cold blood. He also betrayed numerous friends, including real
people who were right there at the table in front of me.

But
I never went home and thought about it much afterwards. It was only
the imaginary girl. We did it without thinking about it. Only later,
lying in bed in the dark did I start to wonder if I did a bad thing.

I
decided that I was going to play my character as a fractured good guy
from that point, which I failed to do, and he decided to rip off some
gamblers, which he failed to do. He was shot by police. Which he
deserved.

Maybe
it's because it was a woman, or because we never really knew why they
wanted her, or because we only met her once so she didn't really have
any personality, she was just a cipher really. A blank space to read
into.

I
was reading a Zak S post on G+ and thinking about morality in games
and if the things in games have any relation to the real world. I
think they do, but the translation between the two is long, distant,
inconstant and strange.

I
imaging holding a long loop of very pure silk in my hands, it's
evening and the silk is grey so it just reaches off into the gloom,
you don't really see any particular point where it disappears, only
endless fine gradations of darkness. And the silk is being pulled
through my hands, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It's so smooth that
I can barely tell its moving at all. I have to concentrate on the
sensation in my fingertips but I can never be certain. I could clamp down at any point and the silk would be
still, but I don't.

I
banned rape in my D&D games. And child abuse, and child
endangerment. It's never actually come up with anyone I play with, so
it's only a tacit rule, invisible and untested. But it's there.

The
murders and thefts go ahead as normal, they don't leave any
particular stain on my memory. I don't think about them while I walk
home or before I fall asleep.

"And intelligent. And they are begging you for help. So. Will you sell the innoc.."

"Can we make a deal with the snails so that we put them in a shed or wherever they need to go but some come with us and we can carry one each and talk to them and they can communicate with each other so we have like telepathic radio?"

Saturday, 7 July 2012

"I'm not going to listen to you. I know about you. You are a powerful advocate for your province and you have your reasons for wanting money in your province. Maybe the man in Samawah is less good as an advocate. So I am just going to have to rely on my numbers. Some numbers are better than no numbers."

I told him that was nonsense.

"How do you propose I allocate money then?"

I suggested he gather us all at a table, ask tough questions, let us justify our requests, listen to us argue, get to know our personalities, correct for those who seemed more forceful, and come to a decision. I said, "You can't get around problems with numbers. It doesn't matter how many people died; it matters how they died and why and who killed them, and for that you need political officers. There is no exact relationship between your indexes and policy. You may want to put more money into a richer place if it is about to collapse into civil war; you may-"

"What you suggest is very messy, imprecise and imperfect," he interrupted. "There will be biases. That is why we use metrics."

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

That has to be the most emotional game of D&D I've ever played. half way through I was pretty sure that Teen1 and Teen2 were going to stop being friends. They conspired against each other, let each other down and spent most of their time trying to get their characters as far away from each other as possible. Even in the dungeon.

Half way through I had to give them 3 minutes of Republican Dad, a lengthy speech which begin with 'O.K, fuck your freedom of agency' and ended with 'you will work together as a team or I swear to god I will fucking kill you.'. I honestly thought his might be the last game as they wouldn't turn up again.

The whole thing ended with the teens finally learning to check for traps by throwing rocks, discovering a secret door, rescuing the family of a local farmer and tricking some skeletons out of treasure. Teen1 volunteered to stay behind and hold of the monsters while the other two escaped. They chose to stay as well and Teen2 ended up sacrificing himself to save Teen1, who had been reduced to Zero HP while Teen3 saved them all by setting his Vornheim Hexenhund on the remaining skeletons.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.